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doctorho · 2 years

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Neon lights

hi babes!!!! not sure what this is but here ya go✨✨✨

Viktor x gender neutral reader, 5k words

modern no magic au, viktor is still disabled but not actively dying au, everyone is an academy student because i said so. this will be a two part story!

summary: The last exams of the season are over in the Academy, and people are celebrating. Jayce, Mel and Viktor have a victorious pub quiz team, and after your classmates stand you up, you join them. And end up spending the night sitting in Viktor's lap.

Warnings: bar scene, implied drinking/alcohol but no-one's really drunk. also i think i might have accidentally given the reader anxiety

Tags: @writingmysanity

It’ll be fun, they’d said. You have to come, they’d said. Let’s all go, they’d said.

And then they, your stupid traitorous classmates, dared not to show up. Which you, of course, only found out after dragging your sorry ass to the bar.

It was a statistical miracle none of them were there, really. Celebrating the end of exam season was standard custom, and usually everyone flooded to the closest bars and nightclubs, probably increasing their nightly revenue by at least 500%.

The place was packed, as usual, but you just couldn’t find any of the people that had participated in talking you into coming.

Maybe they’re just not here yet, your brain offers only semi-helpfully, and you only semi-believe it. The quiet unsettling anxiety of being alone in a place where everyone else had someone to talk to starts to creep up on you, and a part of you starts to regret leaving home in the first place. For a moment, you wonder if they could have done this to you on purpose, but that doesn’t make much sense, so you try to abandon that particular train of thought.

It was loud, the floors were sticky, and your clothes were getting more uncomfortable by the minute. You could have been home reading. Watching a movie. Playing a game. Something. Something familiar, something quiet, something comfortable.

An annoying little echo of something one of your friends – real friends, not ones that stood you up at bars – had said to you once plays out in your head.

Doing things is good for you.

Don’t be alone all the time.

You sigh a little to yourself.

Ugh, fine, you think, and then you take a deep breath, squish that creeping anxiety like an annoying bug, and walk to the bar.

You were already there.

You might as well try to have some fun. There was supposed to be a pub quiz later – with only topics that no-one would have to learn in school – and that seemed interesting. Maybe you could get something good to drink, find a nice corner, and try that. One person teams were allowed, if you remembered correctly.

The bar is crowded, with everyone wanting drinks and refills and trying to hit on the bartenders, so you have to wait a while before you can order, but that’s fine. At least you have something to do.

Leaning on the counter, you look around as you wait your turn. The place was full of students; some of whom you recognized but didn’t really know, people you had seen around but never talked to, a few you’d shared classes or lab shifts with but no longer remembered the names of.

It makes you feel a little better that to them, you were probably just another nameless face in the crowd, just like they were to you.

Slowly, you get used to the surroundings, the too-loud mind numbing music and soft-sticky floors, people bumping into you occasionally. It all fades into a background mush of a steady hum and droning of the bass.

When it’s finally your turn, you order something that had a strange name and a funny color, and that was definitely overpriced. But everything there was, so you try not to dwell on it. Your drink comes with a purple glow stick and turns out to be sweet, ambiguously fruity, and so good that a part of you was disappointed.

You’d want more of those.

Dammit.

You tuck that thought to the back of your head – a problem for future you – and walk away from the counter, making space for other people waiting to order. You’re not sure if the whole drink is purple, or if that’s just the glow stick, but you decide that that doesn’t really matter.

Looking for a free spot away from the loudspeakers, you successfully make it to a far corner without spilling your drink or crashing into anybody, which was, in itself, a victory of sorts.

And then you almost spill your drink anyway when someone calls your name. Loudly.

It’s Jayce. One of the more familiar faces on campus. You’d had some classes with him, seen him around, in events and workshops and at the library. He was the kind of person that seemed to be everywhere, so really, you weren’t that surprised to see him. He could pop up at the lab, or in an office or a hallway somewhere, or a fundraiser or a gala or a competition at any given moment, smile politely and stop for some smalltalk, and then continue on his way. He was everywhere and he was friends with everybody, at least on some level, it seemed. Most often he was in the company of one of two people, though;

Mel, who was currently sitting on his lap,

or Viktor, who was sitting next to them, avoiding being squished between Jayce and the wall. The three of them were on a two-person couch, in one of the far corners.

You gather yourself and slip closer to them, grateful to have somewhere to go and someone to hang out with.

Mel being there didn’t surprise you. She was – not shockingly – also the type of person that seemed to be everywhere or at least have some contacts there, so her participation in social events wasn’t out of the ordinary. She was studying something in the realm of political science, you weren’t sure of the details, but you had already mentally accepted the possibility that she would probably be running for president someday.

Viktor, however? Viktor didn’t…do this. Not that you knew, at least. You’d shared classes with him, too, and he was in the lab more often than not. You weren’t exactly sure what he did as a student and what he did as a teacher’s assistant, the line between the two seemed to be a bit hazy, and he also seemed to have some independent job working at the lab. He’d talked about it before, but you were pretty sure you still didn’t know all of it.

He was the type of person that would just casually say I have to go tend to the porous silicon now, excuse me, and never explain what the porous silicon was for, because apparently that part was obvious.

Or, you know, he’d reveal himself as working as a teacher’s assistant only after you’d only complained to him about the poor quality the class had been organized in.

At least he had had fun with that one.

And at least he’d agreed.

So, when you saw him, it was usually either in the lab, in the library, or out somewhere getting coffee. Most of your interactions consisted of lab-related things, or homework, or complaining about the inconvenient and too-short hours places such as the library, the cafeteria, or the coffee shops were open.

This was not a place you expected to see him in.

“Care to join our team?” Mel asks, pulling you out of your thoughts, “We could use a fourth.”

Ah.

The pub quiz.

That made sense.

You relax a little as you get out of the crowd properly and close enough to talk to them without having to shout. “Sure,” You say, giving them a smile, “Sounds fun.”

Then, you lick your lips and swallow, looking over the room quickly again. “I was supposed to come here with some classmates but I think they might have stood me up.”

Mel hums a little in response, Jayce frowns, and Viktor looks almost a little offended on your behalf.

“Well, we’re more than happy to have you on our team.” Mel continues, “Do you happen to have any obscure areas of expertise that might be useful?”

You smile at her. “I guess we’ll have to see.”

“Last chance to google something.” Jayce says, already looking down at his phone.

You furrow your brows, a little amused, and look at Viktor. “Do you guys usually prepare for this a lot?” You ask, “You know the winners get like, a coupon for drinks, not their weight in gold and half the kingdom?”

Viktor smiles a little. “Yes,” He answers, leaning forward slightly, “but it’s more fun if you win.”

“Besides,” Jayce adds, still not looking up from his phone, “free drinks.”

“And –” Viktor nods, even though Jayce can’t see him, “if we get enough of those coupons, isn’t it kind of like getting half the kingdom?”

“Oh, so you’re playing the long game then,” You smile, “going to win, what, for the next couple of decades and drink for free?”

“Give or take.” He answers, “Not sure where this place is valued at. Might take less than a decade. This isn’t exactly a high-class establishment.”

“But it is popular,” Mel interjects, sounding like she’s only half-serious, “students bring in a lot of money. Not compared to some other places, but still.”

Jayce hums in agreement, shifting a little in his place as he puts his phone away. He only needs to point towards the nearest table before Mel leans over, grabs a piece of paper that was, apparently, their answer sheet, and modifies their team to include four, not three people.

“You should sit,” She says, as she’s writing, and for a second you just look at her.

Where? is the obvious question your brain immediately supplies, you three barely fit there and there’s no free seats anywhere.

Before you can ask, she looks up at you and answers.

By gesturing towards Viktor.

“It would make me look better if you sat on his lap, too.” Mel continues, like it’s the most reasonable thing ever, “That way I won’t stand out as much and look stupid on my own. Besides, we’ll all be close to each other that way. Easier to conspire.”

For a moment, you stare at her.

And then you stare at Viktor, who is, slowly but steadily, turning slightly red.

“Hang on,” Jayce says, “you think sitting on my lap makes you look stupid?”

Mel smiles and leans back against him. “Depends on the context.” Mel answers, before turning her attention back to you, and to Viktor.

Who clears his throat.

“I mean – if you want –” He says, and it’s exactly as much of a coherent sentence as you were expecting. It’s exactly as much of a coherent sentence as you would have been capable of in his place.

“Are you sure?” You ask him, slightly hesitant. This was, this whole situation and where it was going, wildly uncharted waters. Yes, you were friends or – or something, you were closer to him than you were to anyone else there, but sitting in his lap was not something you had expected to happen.

And – yes, you were not opposed to the idea, not at all, but –

“Yes,” He answers, “don’t worry, you won’t break me.”

“He’s tougher than he looks.” Jayce agrees, and for a second, you just let yourself feel everything around you.

The music. The sticky floor. The aftertaste of the sugary sweet drink in your mouth. The way Viktor was looking at you.

The moment.

You mentally strangle the hesitant anxiety pooling at the bottom of your stomach, shrug softly with one shoulder, and take a few steps to stand directly in front of Viktor, your knees brushing his. Handing your drink to Mel for safekeeping, you carefully settle into his lap, barely daring to breathe, making sure not to knock over the cane that was leaning against the wall next to him.

“I’m not hurting you, am I?” You ask him quietly, leaning back slightly so he could hear you better, “You should tell me if I am.”

He swallows – you can feel it. “Eh, no –” He says, and his voice is so close that it surprises you, “ – you’re not. Don’t worry.”

You exhale, slowly, and try your best to relax.

Trying is the best you can do, though – feeling him pressed against you is causing way too many thoughts and feelings to happen for you to truly focus on anything else. He was warm, and firm, and you could feel his breathing, and you were sitting in his lap.

You were. In his lap.

You were not even going to let your brain go there.

No, this was a normal, casual situation, and you were going to be cool about it. So what if you had a crush on him? So what if you could feel him pressed against your back, your ass –

“Good.” Mel says, smiling as she hands your drink back to you. You take it, carefully, trying not to move too much in case it’d make him uncomfortable.

You were going to be cool about this.

You came here to have fun, and that’s what you were going to do.

“Thanks.” You tell her, giving her a smile and trying your best to act normal about the whole situation.

“What is that?” She asks, motioning towards your drink with one hand, “It looks good.”

“Oh.” You answer, looking down at your drink again, racking your brain for the name of it, “Something new, I think? It was called, uh, Krypton?”

“Right, they’re doing that periodic table thing.” Jayce comments.

“Naming drinks after elements?” Mel asks, “Why?”

“Probably because a lot of nerds frequent this place.” Viktor answers, and again, his voice is so close that it’s like he’s talking directly into your ear. You can feel it, the words rumbling through his chest.

“What’s it taste like?” Mel continues, ignoring his comment, “Krypton?”

You hum thoughtfully, and take a sip.

“I would hope not.” Viktor answers while you’re trying to figure out what it does taste like.

“Krypton doesn’t taste like anything.” He continues, “That’d be a pretty sad drink.”

You can’t help smiling at his answer.

“Why do you know that?” You ask, leaning closer to him again, tilting back your head slightly.

You can’t see it, but you can hear the smile in his voice when he answers.

“I know a lot of things. You'd be surprised.” He says.

Quietly.

Just for you.

Before you let yourself get too focused on what his voice sounds like that – close and quiet, so close – you take a breath and turn to look at Mel again.

“I think it tastes like lemon and rose.”

She lifts her eyebrows and nods thoughtfully. “I think I’m going to try that once we get our kingdom’s worth of free drinks.”

“Wasn’t it half a kingdom?” Jayce asks, reaching for his own drink on the table.

“I’m optimistic.” Mel answers, smiling.

“Is krypton purple?” Jayce then continues, now, you’re assuming, to Viktor.

He hums in answer, and you can feel it. Every slow second of his chest reverberating against your spine, you could feel it resonate in your rib cage, and then when he speaks, it’s no better. His voice is so close that it’s all you could focus on, etching the sound of it into permanent memory without even trying.

“It glows purple,” He says, “if you run a high enough voltage electric current through it. It’s colorless, normally, but for the sake of argument I guess we can say that it’s purple, yes.”

“Huh.” Jayce answers, leaning back in his seat.

Viktor mirrors his movement, and you can feel him shift under you.

His hand brushes your side, and then settles by your waist, a weight so light you half think you’re imagining it.

That, inevitably, reminds your entire body of the position you were in, which was extremely close to him. and you need to focus a lot of your energy on not combusting on the spot. You had never been so close to him before – why would you have been, you were friends – and this was… a whole lot of entirely new sensations.

He was so close.

What was he thinking? What was he feeling?

Was it as much as you were feeling?

You were acutely aware of every single point of contact between your bodies, and you were trying not to think about it too much, but, well, that’s just impossible. He was so close, and you could still feel his every breath, feel his every word rumble through his chest, and –

Mel says something to you, pulling your focus back to her. She’s explaining how the quiz works, what the rules are, and you try your best to listen.

In the background, though, Jayce and Viktor are talking something about circuit boards, and you can feel his every word. And it is wonderful and heavy and almost unfair, how he’s so close and not closer. How he’s talking like this, every word brushing past your ear, and you know it’s not really what it feels like. This isn’t for you, you’re just there.

But…he wouldn’t have agreed to this if he didn’t want you there, right? He wasn’t a person that did things he didn’t want to do. He didn’t stay in situations he didn’t like. And he wouldn’t be here if he didn’t want to be.

He hums in response to something Jayce had said, and leans closer to you.

Closer to the table.

“Can you hand me my drink?” He asks, voice quiet, and very close to your ear. Smooth, and gentle, and low, it goes straight to the pit of your stomach. You can feel him nod towards the table, and, presumably, the one half-full glass there.

For a single heartbeat, you just revel in that feeling. And then you let go of that and lean towards the table, putting down your own drink and grabbing what must have been his.

“Yeah,” You exhale, and hold it out to him carefully. “here.”

His hand snakes past you, and his fingers brush yours, careful as ever as he takes the drink from you. “Thank you.” He breathes, so close you can feel his breath on your cheek, and you have to suppress a shiver.

And then he’s back to talking about the circuit boards – something about heat resistant coating and trying to find a new way to attach some wires – and you listen. Try not to feel guilty about how much you were enjoying every second.

They go back and forth for a moment, going through ideas, and you listen. You’re not sure what it’s about, not anything you were familiar with. Probably not course work, then.

You reach over to the table to grab your own drink again, and then settle back against him. He’s mid-sentence, saying something about mechanical stress – No, that won’t work, it will put too much stress on the wires – and you sip your drink, trying to figure out what they were talking about. They both probably knew more about engineering than you did, but you were still curious.

“What’s the problem?” You ask, leaning back against his chest and tilting your head up, closer to him.

He breathes out a quiet hum before explaining.

“We want to connect two circuit boards in moving parts,” He explains, “which means it needs to be more durable than it is now. The solder keeps breaking, and the wires would get damaged in the long run.”

You hum thoughtfully, trying to get a hold of the problem. “What have you tried so far?”

“Additional joints,” Jayce answers, and you can feel Viktor nod.

“Heat resistant coating, it protects the wires.” Viktor adds.

“...But not the connections.” You continue the thought, nodding.

“Right.” Viktor agrees, “The components are small, the solder can’t take the stress.”

You hum thoughtfully, thinking it through. “Right.”

And then you lean towards Mel, and the answer sheet for the oncoming quiz. “Gimme.” You reach towards the paper, “The pen, too.”

She looks surprised, and you roll your eyes a little. “I’m going to use the blank side.” You reassure her, and slowly, she hands you the paper and the pen.

“Have you tried putting any kind of casing around the connection?” You ask, “What’s the geometry like?”

“Eh–” He starts, leaning closer to see the paper, “No. And it’s flat.” Then, he shifts a little, “Do we have space for casings?”

That’s aimed towards Jayce, and while he thinks, you draw a tentative sketch of what you were thinking. If the soldered connections were the brittle part but the wire itself could be coated, they could build a protective casing around the connection, and let the wire go through it.

“If we move around the components a bit,” Jayce answers, “then I think so, yeah?”

You can feel Viktor nod slowly, and he leans closer, to look at the paper over your shoulder.

“Would something like this work?” You ask, knowing he was watching, studying it. You lean back and put down the pen, giving him a better view of what you’d drawn.

He hums thoughtfully, and his breath hits your cheek, the low rumble of his voice feeling like it wraps itself around your spine and drips straight into your core.

You do your best to ignore it.

“Could work.” He says quietly, before reaching for the pen. You tug it closer for him to reach, and he takes it, and scribbles something down to the paper, too.

“We have three wires,” He mutters, drawing three small lines inside your model of the casing. “we’d need to –” He trails off, and you assume that at this point, he’s mainly talking to himself. That’s okay by you; you just listen to his voice and watch as he draws with quick, nimble fingers. His breathing is deep and steady, and you can feel all of it.

He keeps sketching, and then exhales deeply, shifting slightly again. “That could work. We could try that.” He says, thoughtfully, lifting the paper from the table and looking at it for a moment before handing it to Jayce. “What do you think?”

You smile, proud of yourself for potentially solving their problem, and Jayce looks over the sketch, squinting in the low lighting.

As Viktor leans back to his original spot, you settle against him again – and his hand grips your hip, hard, holding you in place.

“Please don’t say anything.” He whispers, quiet and breathy, directly into your ear. Closer than at any point before.

For one fast heartbeat, you’re confused.

And then you realize what’s going on; in the new position, you’re pressed against him again.

“I can’t–” He continues through his teeth, voice still so quiet you barely make it out, and the sentence ends in a quiet, frustrated groan. "...control this, at the moment."

You can feel his breathing, now considerably less relaxed than before, and – you’re pretty sure you could even feel his heartbeat, fast and pounding against you.

Unless that was your own. You weren’t sure.

You could feel every inch of him pressed against you.

Including what was definitely an erection.

The realization makes heat flood through you, and with it, a few anxious knots somewhere deep inside you dissolve.

One, he definitely wasn’t uncomfortable with you being in his lap, then, at least not in the way you’d feared, and two; you weren’t the only one feeling like this. Feeling like your skin was tingling, like you wanted to drink in every second of this and burn it to your memory, your focus honing in on every point of contact.

You glance over at Jayce and Mel – both studying the drawing now.

Good.

You smile a little to yourself.

“Circuit boards, then?” You whisper, tilting your head so that you were talking only to him, “That’s what does it for you?”

He exhales a small, slightly-strangled chuckle, and briefly drops his head on your shoulder.

“Right.” He mutters, sarcastically. “That’s what this is about. Absolutely doesn’t have anything to do with you being in my lap.”

He still sounds like he’s whispering through gritted teeth, and for a moment, you feel genuinely sorry for him.

But not so sorry that it would cancel out everything else you were feeling about him.

This was the guy you’d had a crush on for – far too long. And here he was. Like this. Because of you.

You were on uncharted waters, for sure; teetering on the edge of something.

And you wanted to know what was on the other side.

“Sorry.” You breathe out.

You’re not sorry. Not really. And he knows it; you can hear it in the half groan - half sigh that he makes.

“How am I supposed to focus on anything,” He whispers, “like this, when you’re right there?”

“Sorry.” You try again, and it’s not sincere this time, either.

“This is torture.”

“The good kind?”

He swallows, and his hand on your hip flexes, tightening the grip.

“The best.”

You look over to Jayce and Mel again. They’re talking about something, you can’t hear what it is, but that’s just good. It means that odds are they couldn’t have heard anything of your conversation either.

Mel gets your attention first, asking you to go to the bathroom with her before the quiz – apparently she needs a buffer to make sure she doesn’t get caught in any conversations – and as she explains this, Viktor’s grip on your hip loosens, and he sighs quietly.

“Sorry.” You breathe in his direction, this time more sincerely.

In response, he lets out a long exhale, and shifts a little as you get up.

You feel genuinely bad for him now, but at this point, there wasn’t much you could do.

At least there was a table in front of him.

Mel tells the boys to watch your drinks as she pulls you along. The people had moved to the tables, mostly, in anticipation of the quiz, and the bathroom wasn’t as crowded as it could have been. You don’t even need to wait in line.

“Still no sign of your friends?” Mel asks, casually, as she’s checking her makeup in the mirror outside of the bathroom doors.

“No,” You answer, “but they’re not really my friends. Just classmates.”

She hums in answer. Then, she changes the topic, as smoothly as she does everything else.

“How’s it going with Viktor?” She asks, and coming from her, it sounds casual. Like a totally normal question.

You don’t know how to give her a normal answer, though.

She glances at you, waiting.

“What do you mean?” You ask, which is stupid, because the question doesn’t really leave much up for interpretation.

She lifts a single eyebrow. “I mean,” She says, slowly, “you two fit together like nuts and bolts, the boy has had a massive thing for you for ages, and you’re sitting in his lap.” She lists, “So, how’s it going?”

You swallow, trying to think of something to say.

“Good,” you start, “good, I guess?”

That was true. It definitely wasn’t going badly. It was weird and new and you wanted to speak to him somewhere where you could be alone, but whatever this weird new thing was it definitely wasn’t bad.

She hums again. Looks at you for a moment, before turning back to her reflection. “Good.” She echoes, “he deserves good things.” she adds, “and so do you.”

You nod a little, not sure how to answer.

She doesn’t wait for an answer before walking out. "Come on."

Right.

Now you just needed to go back out there, sit on his lap for the rest of the night without spontaneously combusting, and figure out where to go from there.

That was going to be fun.

Part 2

#viktor arcane x reader #viktor x reader

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thedo0zyslider · 1 year

Text

And The Universe Said - 9k Words

Once upon a time, there was a player

Or: Empires Season 2 endings and some bits afterwards, but with a little inspiration from the end poem sprinkled in

A03 Link

“And the universe said I love you.”

Animalia was bustling that day, and Lizzie was absolutely beaming with joy.

Her tail flicked against the stone roads of her empire happily, watching as everyone set up for the show. She wasn’t sure the exact reason she’d decided to have a show, it just felt appropriate. It felt like the end of an era for the empires in some sense, so why not celebrate? Also, not only were shows fun , they brought in revenue . And she could show off her talented little citizens!

She reached the main area, near where the stage was set up, and observed the final preparations. All of the emperor's friends, minus the ever elusive False, had accepted their invitations. Now all eleven of them were sitting around, talking and laughing. Even some who supposedly hated each other seemed to be tolerant of their enemies presence, just for the night anyways.

Before she moved forward, Lizzie did something she’d thought she’d never do. She reached up to the sides of her face, and unhooked her mask.

The feline wasn’t sure why she’d kept it a secret for all this time, well except for the beginning. Though after a few months keeping the mask on had seemed pointless, yet she'd continued doing it anyway for her own sense of comfort. Everyone could tell she was a cat, despite (in her opinion) the rather good human disguise. Lizzie had ears and a very obvious tail, for goodness sake!

The mayor supposed she was doing it now because no one had seemed to care. They had shown no hint of cruelty that her ancestors had faced, everyone had let her wear the disguise; they’d let her talk about it when she was ready. No one had pressured her into taking it off, or asking questions about why she was so obviously hiding her cat-like face. And now, well she was ready to show it, so her friend’s patience had paid off in the end.

She set the mask inside a spare barrel, fully intending to leave it there and never touch it again, before joining the little group at the foot of the stage.

Fwhip waved her over, his own tail flicking as well, and the mayor hurried to join him. Lizzie took a seat next to her fellow critter, her best friend, and more people began to gradually fill up the little show area. Before she knew it, after about ten minutes of conversation and teasing a certain Sheriff, the show was ready to start. To her delight, her true face was not made into a big deal. It seemed to be an accepted fact that Lizzie had taken the mask off, and that was that.

She watched the wonderful show in the setting sun, laughing as Oli was lightheartedly booed off stage, and as her star Ariana Goatee replaced him. Yep, this was definitely a new era for their little empires. And it felt like it was gonna be a good one.

“And the universe said you have played the game well.”

Joey hummed, watching as the waves lightly crashed into the side of his docks. He was setting up his ship currently, planning to go on yet another sea-bering expedition. He wasn’t sure when he’d return to eversea, but he probably would. Unless something went wrong of course, but Joey was a very skilled pirate! Nothing would go wrong under his watch!

He looked at his crew, most of them beginning to gather on the boat with a tense smile. They were one sort now. A certain first-mate-who-shall-not-be-named was a traitor, and it still stung, even after all these weeks of processing and trying to successfully get over it. Maybe Joey just had to accept that the sting would never go away, and that’s what being betrayed by your best friend did to your heart. Didn’t mean he had to like it though.

Though that day he’d been captured and lost a friend also had some positive sides he supposed. Because that day he’d finally settled his differences with Shelby and Katherine, his two wonderful friends who’d saved him when he thought no one else would. It was nice, the pirate found, having two fellow emperors who actually liked him and enjoyed his company. He still had a little crush on Katherine of course, and so did Shelby, but Joey was learning to handle that better and more….naturally than he had before. He learned that whoever Katherine chose, or if she chose no one at all, that it would be fine, because he would still have friends waiting for him when he returned home from sea.

That reminded him! He’d promised to bring said wonderful friends some shiny treasure back! So he’d best be off soon, these little expeditions could take quite a while. Shelby said she might be leaving within the year, and he was not going to miss saying goodbye to his favorite little witch! Even if she was the only witch he actually knew.

Joey clammored on board, calling out greetings to his crew, and darted enthusiastically for the ship’s wheel. His comrades joined in his eagerness, all them excited to be out at sea after…hell years of being landlocked.

The pirate gave a dramatic tip of his hat to his new first mate, and set sail from Eversea for the first time. His home, his beautiful empire faded into the distance, and he hoped he’d be returning in time.

“And the universe said everything you need is within you.”

Katherine stood at her balcony, staring down at her kingdom with a smile. The curse was lifted, the land was healed, and now her people rejoiced below her. The Princess observed fondly as her citizens mingled below her, enjoying the celebration festival she’d ordered to be set up. It was the happiest her empire had been…well since she was born probably.

Despite her seemingly boundless joy, the Princess of Glimmer Grove still felt like a fool. The solution to her home’s curse had been right in front of her for so long, since her first day ruling in fact. She would’ve never thought the fairies were capable of lifting the disease affecting her lands, and no one else she’d consulted had thought that either. Hell, her own people had never even thought to ask the magical creatures so close by them for so many years. That made her feel less stupid, less, not fully smart. She thinks everyone could’ve been smarter, instead of blaming a poor newborn baby for a curse because she’d been born at the same time. That had just been a dumb coincidence!

Katherine shook herself, determined not to get too sour over that fact. She’d always loved her people unconditionally, no matter what nasty words they’d thrown at her. If she hadn’t then she wouldn’t have wasted so long trying to find such an obvious cure. It wasn’t the first time that wondered if her birth was meant to be an omen, one that she could cure this mysterious curse; and that it had just been very easy to interpret wrong. Though despite that she frowned with a huff, as a part of her did have to wonder what would have happened if she didn’t, if she chose to not fix her lands and focus on other things instead. She was going to get coffee with Shelby in a few days….

Her mother’s voice jerked the Princess out of her thoughts, and her vibrant smile returned in full force. She spun around to meet her parents downstairs, battle axe comfortably resting against her back. Her kingdom being healed didn’t stop monsters from spawning, and after the festival's end she planned to stay up all night slaying monsters! She would have so many stories to tell her favorite little witch over coffee!

Katherine ran down her castle stairs as fast as she dared, and stepped out into the next part of her story.

“And the universe said you are stronger than you know.”

A light drizzle fell over the world, seemingly caused by the presence of a very peculiar witch. She smiled as she flew home on her broomstick, the gentle breeze whipping at her face, running through her pure white hair and the raindrops feeling nice on her face. The Storm Witch always liked to think on broom rides like this.

She thought of how she’d basically become the new Supreme Witch, well technically. Shelby had come second to Scott in the final battle, but that latter had ended up giving away his powers to bring a loved one back to life. She was quite happy that the necromancer had completed his goal, having seen how much her friend had been suffering before. The world of witches had become sort of a mess since the tournament, so when El brought the Supreme’s crown back it had been handed to Shelby for the time being. Until Bertha could be found, she had all the power any witch could ever want.

It was kinda funny in hindsight, how weak she thought she used to be. Back when she first visited what would become the Evermoore, Shelby had been a weaker witch, and probably hadn’t been giving herself enough credit. She had only been a beginner back then, yet managed to shift dimensions and create a successful potion business from it.

Thinking of her first days as a witch always gave Shelby a big sense of nostalgia. She thinks she should visit soon, after this stop of course. The Storm Witch often missed her old stomping grounds, as it still felt like home; even ten years after leaving it for good. Her last proper visit had been….well a good year or two before the tournament had started, so a trip by was definitely a little overdue. Shelby smiled softly as she flew, hearing a crack of thunder in the distance. She wondered vaguely if it was from Joel, just as she did with every thunderstorm that occurred these days.

Speaking of her emperor friends, she wondered how Sausage was doing. The Storm Witch missed that man a great deal, they’d become best friends during those two years after all. Though he kept in contact the best he could, always getting Hermes to send a message and making the boy live up to his name. Or he’d get Joel to strike her house with lightning, which was rude. She wondered if he’d gone to see Fwhip often enough, knowing how lonely the little goblin could get sometimes. She wondered if Scott would be at Chromia this time of year, and if he’d be interested in some of the new shiny things she’d gotten over the past few weeks.

Shelby landed at her destination soon after, ceasing almost all thoughts and memories of her old friends. She’d see them soon enough, but first she had to see her again.

“And the universe said you are the daylight.” (gem)

Gem strolled through the streets of dawn, watching as the street lights began to slowly light up for the night. Behind her the sun was setting into the ocean, and around her citizens were starting to head in for the night. Though a few groups were making their way to the tavern, and the Princess was sure that place would always be filled to the brim with drunkards; no matter who led the kingdom.

She turned to watch the sunset for a final time, and didn’t hate the darkness as much as she had before. It was nice to stand in it, but only sometimes. And she certainly wasn’t leaving this word under the cover of the night. Nope , Gem was gonna leave in full view of everyone, sun reflecting off her wings and everything. Make her last moments in her empire memorable and full of light.

There was a sudden blue spark on the floor, and the princess smiled. At least the darkness made her little wisp friends shine a bit brighter than they did in the sun.

“Alright, alright, I’m going !” She laughed, little blue fires swarming around her feet. Gem walked back to her house as fast as she could with the little guys swarming her, giggling all the way. They were very impatient to get her back on Hermitcraft, it seemed.

Gem laid in her bed, and turned this world's night to day for the final time.

The sun was rising just a minute after it had set, and it wasn’t for the first time the princess wondered if it ever got tired. Though calling herself a princess didn’t feel right anymore, because she was never a real princess. She was still a high elf, deep down. A high elf with two very lovely, but very annoying neighbors waiting for her back at home. Gem shuddered to think at what pranks had befallen her beloved Hermitcraft base during her absence.

She exited her house for the final time, and took a good look around Dawn; the empire she'd built up from nothing. Gem still wondered how exactly she strolled into this world, and why she had. She didn’t regret in the slightest, not at all. These past ten months had been amazing, yet at the same time far too short; though in this world ten months was like, a few years? She wasn’t sure, time worked differently in different worlds. Like timezone, Gem supposed, but extra confusing and weird. All she knew was that in Hermitcraft land it had been a rather standard ten months, and in Empires at least a few years had gone by. Which made sense really, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was any empire here. Though the time stuff had led to some awkward conversations of just how long ago certain events had happened with her fellow emperors.

And oh, her friends! She was gonna miss her friends so much! Gem had already said goodbye to Sausage and Oli, who understandably didn’t react very well. So she’d decided that maybe no more goodbye were necessary. Those two would tell everyone else where she went! Probably. Hopefully . She had told the most…erm, reliable people she was leaving, now had she? Both of them were sure to dramatize it, and the ginger let out an amused huff at the thought.

Distantly, the former princess wondered if she’d see them again in some lifetime, other than False. She knew she’d always keep seeing False on Hermitcraft. And Pearl, since she seemed connected to this world somehow. Part of her had always wondered if there had been some other Gem here before her. She was content not to know the answer to that one, just hoped that if that Gem had existed, that she got out okay. (Even if the current Gem really doubted that, based on the brief history she’d heard from Pix. So not fully okay, just getting out semi-okay would work, she supposed.) Gem began moving through her streets for the last time, towards her nether portal. It felt poetic to disappear in front of there, for some reason. Maybe her people would just assume she went to the nether and never returned if she did that.

“C’mon boy,” She mumbled to her beloved bear, Apollo, once she reached him. “Let’s go for one last ride okay?” Apollo just gave a friendly yet tired huff, letting the ginger clamber onto his back for the dozenth time. She gave him a light scratch behind the ears, and he began slowly moving through the empire, stopping to sniff a fair amount of things. Usually Gem liked him to travel faster, but today a slightly slower pace would do. The wisps, still floating nearby, were seemingly tolerating it. Maybe they understood the sentiment of this goodbye.

They strode through the city at a steady place, allowing Gem to take it all in one last time. She waved at the few villagers as they passed, exchanging smiles and good mornings with the people she’d come to know so well. She was sure she’d remember all their names and faces, even when she was gone. She admired her builds, the beautiful gradient texture of the roofs and the glory of her sun church, which reminded her to stop and return her sunglasses. Regrettably, Gem couldn’t take those with her.

Apollo was left by her bees, because she wanted a glimpse of them and the Beekeepers before she departed. The sweet little bear even got some honeycomb, munching on it as Gem removed his harness and saddle. He wouldn’t have anyone to carry around, now that she was gone, but the former princess was certain Apollo would stay. She ignored the squeezing in her chest at the thought of leaving her beloved companion for good, and knew that she was gonna miss his cute little face dearly.

Gem flew the rest of the way there, using her monarch butterfly like wings one last time. They were pretty, and she was going to miss them as well. Maybe she could customize an elytra to look like them when she was back home. Maybe a future base could have some Dawn inspired architecture. Yep, that sounded good, but in a few seasons; when she wouldn’t miss it quite as much and could get all nostalgic. Maybe she’ll have seen her friends again by that point.

It was hard to leave, but she knew it was for the best. She wasn’t supposed to be here anyways. Just because you could travel between worlds doesn’t mean you should .

Gem stood in front of the swirling, purple nether portal, and vanished back home. To anyone else, it would look like she’d just walked through and never reemerged. She was back on Hermitcraft, back in her castle and an elf once more. The wisps floated around her happily, and she giggled as their flames tickled and brushed against her skin. Well, that was her time on Empires done it seemed.

She didn’t let herself linger on that thought, mainly because Gem was running to her front door, checking for any more new additions to her home. And maybe also getting ready to slay Impulse if he had done any more pranking, for funsies of course!

“And the universe said you are the night.”

A goblin looked on the paper at his desk, hands shaking a little as he glanced over it a few more times. It was a notice of retirement. His retirement. Fwhip was retiring, and he'd be announcing it tomorrow. He would've liked to do it today, rip the bandaid off before he gets too nervous. But it's late, he's spent all night writing this, and he needs a drink. Badly

The goblin ruler, well soon to be former ruler, stood from his office desk. He went over how exactly he'd do the announcement one more time. Fwhip had figured he'd tell the few other goblins that worked with him in the more government-like positions, then let them tell the rest of the people afterwards. That seemed good enough, and he could just retire to his house peacefully and ignore all the questions his citizens might have.

He'd walked the path to the bar plenty of times, probably too many times to be healthy really. He found the building quickly and easily, and soon found himself sitting on a bar stool; downing the first of probably many drinks that night. The bartender, far too used to seeing Fwhip here, didn't even raise an eyebrow, and would go on to just wordlessly refill his glass as the hours ticked by.

Fwhip sat in silence, listening to the ambience of the bar and thinking of how he failed as a ruler.

His people probably didn't think he'd failed, because he did what they'd wanted. He'd expanded the empire, made it prosperous, and filled the vault full of gold. But other than those three things, one could argue he'd done a pretty horrible job at leading. Probably because he hadn’t even wanted to lead in the first place.

Fwhip had only been appointed as leader because he was the tallest goblin, not because he showed any actual leaders skills. He was the tallest by like, an inch anyways, and in his opinion other goblins; even some shorter ones; were better suited for the job then he was. Well, Fwhip had some capabilities, but his personal flaws outweighed them greatly. His failed allyship with the Sheriff was a prime example of that.

He took another swig of his drink at the thought. Fwhip had been so obsessive when it came to that man, co-dependent even; which stemmed from a list of problems that only gave him a headache when he thought about them. Everything else had become second priority to Jimmy, to his loyalty to the Sheriff, to his…. affection for him one could call it. Goblands was even pushed to the side, and during their partnership he'd spent most of his time above ground, in Tumble Town with Jimmy. Now Fwhip could hardly stand being in the sunlight for long, much preferring the cool darkness of his cave home.

He thought of the damn house he'd built for Jimmy in Gobland. The house he'd wasted precious gold on, that now sat abandoned and untouched by everyone. No citizen wanted to move in, because it was tailor made for someone else; not to mention the sour air that hung over the building.

That whole friendship had been so…well Fwhip didn’t want to use the word toxic , but he couldn’t think of any other word. Jimmy had his own issues, like demanding respect when doing nothing to earn it ever. His misplaced sense of authority. And Fwhip’s codependency had only made all that worse. They’d made each other's worst traits more horrible, so it shouldn't have been a surprise when they had a big falling out. He cringed to think of how horribly he'd taken that, basically acting like a jealous ex boyfriend.

The goblin started on his third drink, now starting to feel just a bit tipsy. If he knew all the hurt that relationship would cause, he probably would've tried to avoid Jimmy, and then failed because his past self found that man irresistible. Now the two preferred to keep this distance, and god weren't they fucking pathetic ? It had been months and they couldn't even give each other proper apologies, just tense truces for the sake of their own empires.

A man sat down next to him suddenly, and Fwhip looked over with a blink. As fate would have it, his seatmate was the Old Sheriff. Jimmy’s honestly sad attempt at replacing his former deputies. Listen, Fwhip still cared about the blonde, but he could do better than a senile, sixty-something-year old man he found in a cave. He could also use someone who'd give a bit of a wake up call, to fix himself and be the better person everyone knew he could be, and Old Sheriff was probably doing the opposite of that. (Distantly, Fwhip was a little disappointed in himself that he couldn't even be that person for his Sheriff. He beat the thought down to the back of his mind.)

"Hey," He grumbled a greeting to the Old Sheriff. The man glanced at him, and Fwhip could tell he'd entered the bar absolutely hammered . He caught the bartender's eye, and gave a slight shake of his head. It was a signal to not give the older man anything else, mainly because Fwhip doubted he'd pay for it.

The other goblin nodded in acknowledgment. They also seemed to sense what kind of conversation was about to occur, one that should not be overheard, and silently slipped into the back. Fwhip really had to remember their name one day, because that was going on the ever expanding, long list of things he needed to thank them for.

"What is it?" Old Sheriff asked, and Fwhip was surprised his words weren't slurred. The goblin king didn't know why he was about to do this, it was probably the alcohol talking really. Yet still, he opened his mouth and got all sentimental to a man he barely knew.

"Can you pass a message on to Jimmy?" Fwhip began, and had to stop himself before he started anxiety rambling.

"Eh, why not!" The man next to him shrugged. "What'll it be?"

Fwhip took a deep breath, steadying himself. "Tell him I've decided to retire as ruler of Gobland, and as deputy," He almost laughed at himself, really he did. He should've done the last one months ago, for both their sakes. "And I have something that is rightfully he is." Fwhip finished his little speech by passing a piece of paper to the elderly man, one with coordinates hastily yet legibly scribbled down.

They were the coords to the original deputy badge, the one he'd stolen. They were also the coords to his old Sheriff shrine. God the shrine . Fwhip had cringed just thinking of it earlier, and almost did the same now.

The Old Sheriff looked at the paper, then nodded. "Yep, got it." He said, and somehow Fwhip he didn't have it and would ruin this.

"Tell him I'm here, if he ever wants to talk." The only response to that was a grunt, and Fwhip drowned himself in cocktails for the rest of the night. He thought it was cocktails, because he woke up the next morning slumped over the Counter with a headache.

He decided around midday, after he'd officially retired, that he'd invite some friends over to celebrate. He'd never done enough of that before, spending time with his friends. Fwhip felt as if a lot of them would be leaving soon, for some reason, so any time spent with them was looking to be time well spent.

The goblin almost reached out to Jimmy with an invite, but decided against it. The Sheriff would come down when he was ready. And for now Fwhip could focus on other things, like enjoying his newly retired life.

“And the universe said the darkness you fight is within you.”

Cogsmeade, an empire most thought had been abandoned by its ruler, still had its mechanical cogs turning. False liked to think they turned in spite of all the nasty whispers about her. Not much had happened to her after that whole Rift fiasco, not really. She hadn’t vanished, just stayed at home a lot more. And by a lot more she meant one hundred percent of the time.

It was a lot to process really, meeting an alternate version of yourself, having her stalk your home for two months, then finding out you're basically a clone of her who had to be thrown away to another world because of violent tendencies. That would mentally fuck with even Sausage , and False knew he’d been through some messed up dimension hopping stuff; despite not really seeing him in almost a year. It kinda became big news when an emperor started messing with the space time continuum, okay?

She was over all that now, really she was. She’d managed to wrangle those um….borderline homicidal urges in. Really she had! She hadn’t tried to kill anyone since Pix and Jevin back during Rift times. Though she would argue past her hadn’t really been trying to kill them per say, just knock them out and give them some slight amnesia. Though she probably would’ve tried if she had the chance. It didn’t matter in the end, because her idea had worked and they remembered nothing of her weird doppelganger stuff. She thought that's what she wanted the two to forget anyways, False was really blocking out memories of that time.

Her empire had grown as well, becoming more flushed out than it had ever been. The inventor was proud of it, so so proud of it. This place hadn’t started out feeling like home, but now it did. Cogsmeade was home , and her life was going better. She was happier, despite all the unpleasant memories, ones that seemed very persistent at popping up today.

No one liked to remember bad times in their lives, and Cogsmeade’s ruler was just the same in that regard. She hadn’t been able to get rid of that head room per say, but she had locked it up. It kinda disturbed her even thinking about it now, which was progress! No longer wanting to decapitate things was good! Really good!

That was really all that had happened, now that False thought over it. All she’d done was better herself as a person, so the time when she’d “gone missing” was time well spent. She was even considering leaving again, going to make some trades. False liked her solitude just fine, but even loners got well… lonely sometimes.

Trades, yeah that’s a good idea. She thought, making her way back up to her house for the day. False felt like she could trust herself around others again, so maybe she’d go see one of her neighbors. Maybe Scott, maybe Joel, maybe she’d even go all the way down to the Goblands if she was feeling real adventurous.

It didn’t have to be tomorrow though, it could be any day. Whenever she was ready.

“And the universe said the light you seek is within you.”

Sausage hummed, sitting at the empty bar, and ran a hand through his now graying hair. Damn, he was old.

He might be at a bar, but he was drinking juice. Apple juice to be exact. Sanctuary’s ruler didn’t drink as much as he used to back in the day. Even if back in the day had been less than twenty years ago. Though back in the day he had more pressing problems, and now he only had to deal with a teenager. Well, a teenager who’s soon to be an adult.

That put into perspective exactly how many years it had been, because back in the day Hermes had been now older than five. Now he was seventeen, going on eighteen, and begging to use his dads old staff of Sanctuary. It didn’t feel like that long ago really, that Hermes was basically a baby and Sausage was off doing, well god knows what he was doing. He didn’t regret it though. The brunette was still the same man as he had been in his younger years, just more laid back.

He was this close to giving Hermes that staff too, because he was weak for his kid. The little guy had always loved Sausage’s stories about his multiversal travels, his many lives; even if some of them hurt too much to be told. But those things wouldn’t happen to Hermes, because he wasn’t living multiple lives, he was just stopping by. And the young demigod had both Sausage and Bubbles, both more experienced dimension hoppers who would look out for him. (Inwardly, Sausage still shuddered at the thought of Hermes finding one of his old worlds especially. He didn’t know… how he’d answer any questions about a demon or an empire full of blood red sheep, or why one kingdom was now a large explosion hole and why all the water was drained. He just had to hope the kid never found that one.)

Sanctuary’s ruler decided to move his thoughts to something else, like when his friends would next visit. Or when he’d pester them first. A lot of them had left, but a good half of the original thirteen emperors still remained. He especially wanted to know when Shelby’s next visit from the Witch’s Academy would be. They hadn’t seen her in months ! Almost a year ! The brunette thought it was fair to say he missed his best friend a whole lot. He really wanted her to see Hermes again, she was always so excited to see the little guy.

Sausage also wanted Hermes to show off a little bit with his old staff, the one he’d be getting tonight. Was that an impulse decision? Yes, yes it was. But he was sure it would be fine! Hermes knew how to be responsible, and would probably be much more responsible (which did not seem like a typical teenager quality) than Sausage himself had cared to be.

He stood with a hum, yet again running his fingers through new strands of gray hair. Blegh , it felt like he was aging ten years by the minute! He waved goodbye to Bruno, the bartender, and walked outside to get some fresh air.

His feet took him to the church almost on instinct, like she was calling him there. Sausage giggled, finding himself near the chapel’s door and standing in a field of sunflowers. He leaned down with a smile, gently picking one. He’d give this to Hermes later, for good luck. And also a reminder of home, and to look inside himself when he needed too.

That last part sounded really cheesy, but it was true! (He was so going to tell Hermes that and embarrass him later!) All of Sausage’s solutions back in the day seemed to be because of him. Those strange memories of sunflowers? Of a woman in a green dress? The answer was inside him all along, in the form of unlocked little memories of….himself. The Evil King slash His Birth Dad problem? The answer had been himself, multiple versions that is. The Evil Sausage problem? That one was solved by literally merging with a different version of him, so in a way the answer was himself again. The brunette knew he was simplifying this a lot probably, but it worked! It made sense to him!

He picked a few more sunflowers, before deciding not to dawdle around the church for too much longer, lest he age and turn to dust before dinner. He had to get to Eddie and Maria’s for a family dinner soon, with the kid of course. And he needed to swing by and grab the staff from the castle before seeing his son again. He could come visit Santa Perla in the morning anyways, like he always did. She shouldn’t miss him too terribly in the meantime.

Sausage waved goodbye to the church with a smile, sunflowers delicately clutched in his hand, and headed back up the path.

“And the universe said you are not alone.”

Jimmy grumbled something to himself, quickly packing up cat food. He was packing because he was leaving. No, they were leaving. Him and the Old Sheriff were getting the hell out of dodge.

If there was anyone still living in this damn town, they would wonder why their Sheriff was leaving them. It was a long time coming really, but in short? Everything had crumbled around Jimmy’s head, then he had pissed off the fae, and now they were taking over his land. Slowly but surely of course, but the little patch of strange blue grass had almost tripled. It hadn’t even been half a day since he found it either. A lot of things had happened in that half a day actually, and his mind was currently whirring as he packed up as much as he could carry.

Besides finding the fae’s corruption that morning, Fwhip had also given him his deputy badge back. Fwhip , the obsessive little nuisance of a goblin, had actually said sorry and given it back. After months of the two just seeming to tolerate each other. The blonde almost couldn’t believe it, he really couldn’t. Part of the Sheriff still wanted to hate Fwhip too, to hate him and blame all his problems on someone else. But you couldn’t really do that if they said sorry , now could you?

Jimmy was also ignoring the part that wanted so badly to stay , to see his old deputy again and be friends once more. He couldn’t stay, he couldn’t fix anything anymore. He’d been damaged too badly, caused too much damage. It wasn’t healthy for him to stay, to be around all these friends of his. He had to leave . The Sheriff had to start over somewhere new.

He sighed, seeing that dusty, newly regained deputy badge resting at the bottom of his bag. Leaving should hurt. Leaving all this should be harder, because this place had been his life; his home; his pride and joy for almost two and a half years now. Leaving it shouldn’t feel like the easiest thing in the world.

Jimmy reckons he’s good at running. Because this feels like running away, away from his problems so he doesn’t need to actually untangle them. He wonders if he’s always been good at running, in past lives; if those exist. Part of him says he always is.

Running was easy because he could remember. He could remember how Joel had taunted him, how everyone had joined the god in taunting him. Bullying him, that was a better term for it. He remembers how horrible he was to Fwhip, how Fwhip was to him. Remembers why the goblin was fired in the first place, for his general life threatening pranks; pranks he played because it was funny. Because putting a warden near a town that had been full of civilians was funny ; was a gift .

Running was so easy because he remembered how Tumble Town had been empty for months. He remembered how he’d driven all his people away. Remembered how Gem, his friend, his ally since the start, who was supposedly a pacifist had pushed him off the Great Bridge. Running was easy because he didn’t have friends anymore. There was nothing left for him here, hadn’t been for a while.

He did have one friend, he supposed. Old Sheriff was okay, Jimmy guessed. He was more senile and spouted nonsense, but he was funny sometimes. He seemed to care when things got serious, so he was alright. Jimmy was kidding himself really, he was attached to the man. Badly attached. It’s what loneliness does to a person, it makes you attached to the first person willing to tolerate you; even if that person is some guy you found in a cave.

The Old Sheriff had started to call for him, yelling about how he had to hurry up before the faeries at them or something. Jimmy huffed in amusement, and made sure his bag was packed with everything he could possibly need. He adjusted his hat, grabbed Norman the cat, and walked out of his old house for the last time. Flick, Norman’s little brother, started trailing behind him towards the horses.

The two rode off in whatever direction seemed best, cats in tow and bags full of as many supplies as possible. Well, Jimmy’s was. There was a ninety percent chance the Old Sheriff had brought liquor, and only liquor. It was a good thing he’d expected that then.

Running was easy, Jimmy found. There was no tug of pain in his heart as he left. The Sheriff didn’t even spare a glance back to his former empire, the home he’d built from the ground up. And why would he?

There was nothing left for him there.

“And the universe said you are not separate from every other thing.”

Joel was having a really weird day. And that was saying something, because as a god he’d had a lot of weird days.

It was weird because some guy, who looked quite a lot like himself, had descended from the heavens like an angel or something. Apparently he hadn’t been a god this whole time. These past few years had been a test, and the brunette had passed with flying colors. Now he was going to be an actual god. He was going to disappear from the mortal realm as well, which was not preferable. But what could he do about that? Joel, despite all his glory, didn’t think he could control that.

So he’d spent his last few hours saying goodbye. He’d said goodbye to Sausage, to Hermes, to his people. He’d found that some people, Jimmy particularly, were gone when he tried to say goodbye. So that was a shame. And now the god didn’t know what to do. He was leaving soon, and he had nothing to do but think.

So think he did.

He thought about his time here, and decided it had been good. He had enjoyed building Stratos, he thought, sitting on the edge of one of his floating isles. Maybe he should’ve been a bit nicer to Jimmy, maybe he should’ve been a better dad to Hermes, spent more time with Sausage. (The kid had said both of them were awful parents, after all.) Maybe he should’ve been less self absorbed, maybe he should’ve done so many other things. But he must've done a few things right, because they were letting him be a true god in the end.

He was proud of his empire, and he was gonna miss it. He was gonna miss his people, the ones who always put up with his great need for quartz and gold, for what sometimes felt like every material under the sun. They were good people, his villagers. He hoped they thought of him well, he hoped they remembered him. The founder of their empire, the slightly horrible, but sometimes kind god of the sky.

Joel hoped the beautiful empire below him would stay, that it wouldn’t die out. He hoped someone would replace him. He hoped Hermes would keep visiting even after his dad was long gone. Maybe Sausage would see to that, because that seemed like a Sausage thing to do.

He was gonna miss his friends, he thought, running through the emperors in his mind. He was even gonna miss the more annoying ones, like Joey. Or the skittish ones, like False. Joel didn’t get to think of this for long sadly enough, because he soon found himself slowly turning translucent.

He thought that if this place was going to be forgotten after he went, he’d leave something for them to find atop Upper Stratos.

Joel placed the crown down on the grass, right in front of his fountain, and ascended to godhood.

“And the universe said you are the universe tasting itself, talking to itself, reading its own code.”

A man, a ghostly one, moved through the hallways of some old abandoned ruin. It had clearly been a grand castle once, judging by architecture. Pix would know that well though, because he’d spent the past few years of his life trying to study and restore it. Well, the last few years of his life and a little bit of his death. Being turned into a ghost somehow was funny like that.

He thinks it’s about time to move on though, he’d been here long enough. Pixl could always go haunt some other place, or finally move out of the living world. He just had to write some things first. The history of the world wasn’t the best preserved, so he felt some kind of obligation to do it. No one else was, or else they’d have done it before this castle became all old and dusty.

It took a while, longer than he thought really, to write it all out. But Pix did it eventually. As his friends set out on adventures, ascended to godhood, or even left this realm itself, Pix started a new chapter of his life with writing. He was never one for dramatic beginnings anyways.

He wrote of empires of old, of those twelve original emperors. It wasn’t for the first time he wondered how similar most of them were to most of the current ones, minus Sausage and his patron Saint; who literally were those old rulers. He wrote of how their world ended, of the wars, of the demon and the cod and the salmon. He wrote everything he could, about everything he’d gathered from the Ancient Capital’s library, whose books were equally as old as the building that housed them.

He wrote of his beloved little empire too. He wrote of how it was built from survivors of the Old World, how they’d mixed old cultures into something new and beautiful. He wrote about the monuments they’d made, the challenges they faced, and how they too eventually became nothing. He wrote about how a curious little archeologist came to restore their once glorious kingdom, and wrote everything about that man he could. Pix was a part of history as well, but it did feel kinda funny preserving well…. himself .

He wrote a little of the current kingdoms. He wrote of the small sheriff, picking fights with a god. Of the goblin empire, descended from those long ago oceanfolk, now living underground. He wrote of the city above the goblins, one thriving with animals of all kinds. He wrote of color, of cogs, of swamps and witches, of pirates and of half corrupted lands. He wrote of a weird little bard who showed up randomly some day and never quite left, He wrote of a Rift and the stranger visitors it brought with it, he wrote of a dimension traveling little butterfly. He wrote of sun gods, of sunflowers and how one those old emperors never quite left. He wrote of a sanctuary full of magic and old memories. He wrote everything he could into the few open books he had, and everything he memory’s would supply him. Pix really should’ve kept a journal and preserved things as they happened. Yeah, that would’ve been a good idea.

He didn’t document everything from the current time though, because he was leaving. He wasn’t sticking around to see history play out in full. Pix was off to a new adventure, whatever that may be. He had a feeling that one king from long ago, the one that lived in the desert and kinda looked like himself, didn’t do that either. Though he wasn’t sure what happened to that guy, because records of him were hard to find, even harder than some of those long ago elves.

Pix felt like his friends would document stuff for him, and keep his museum nice and tidy maybe. If only to remember him. That’s what he hoped they’d do, as he set those newly finished books down in the library, a hidden gem amongst all those tattered, old books.

After that, Pixlriffs took advantage of his ghost abilities and vanished, leaving the story unfinished; like most people he’d studied seemed to do.

“And the universe said I love you because you are love.”

Scott hummed to himself lightly, feet falling softly against a worn path. Louder footsteps sounded behind him, and he stifled a giggle at his companions excited stomping. Owen could be a little annoying at times, but mostly his little llama friend was stupidly endearing.

“Are we there yet!?” Owen called, catching up to the collector. Scott was suddenly understanding every parent ever to ever exist, because he was being asked that same question every five minutes or so.

“We’re close!” He said, keeping his voice light. He wasn’t that annoyed, not really, not anymore. A few months traveling with the llama had gotten him very used to Owen’s antics. He was learning how to be well, more human than llama by the day too! Which was good, especially because his friend had finally figured out doors!

So yeah, Owen had his moments of being insufferable, but Scott was sure he had his as well. So overall, the brunette was a good traveling companion, and a surprisingly fast learner. Plus he could talk to normal llamas, ones that hadn’t been turned into people, and Scott liked having a way to communicate with her favorite animal very much.

“How do you know that?” Owen asked curiously, tilting his head. Scott giggled again, and pointed at his yellow eye.

“I can see magic? Remember silly?” He smiled, watching as the other’s face lit up, being able to see Owen actually remember in real time. He didn’t blame him for forgetting. There was no external indicator of that power, and Scott never talked about it much. This was like, the third time it had been brought up in almost half a year of traveling.

“ Yep , mhmm! I totalllyy remember!” Owen nodded vigorously in response, and Scott just rolled his eyes.

“I’m sure you do!” He laughed, and they walked in silence for a few minutes, though there was never much silence with Owen around. Scott didn’t mind, because traveling alone and in silence all the time used to get really, really boring .

“Scott?” His llama asked after about ten minutes. He had that semi-rare tone of voice. The quiet one, one that showed Owen had been in some pretty serious thought. “When are we going back to Chromia?” He repressed a smile at that last word, still a little satfisted he’d finally gotten Owen to call his empire by its proper, official name, instead of Llamaland .

Scott looked to his right, fixing Owen with a curious gaze. Ah. He thought. He’s homesick. The collector realized, seeing the expression his friend made. It was one filled with a little bit of longing, and the brunette's two colored eyes were looking off into the distance.

“Maybe in a few months?” Scott suggested it tentatively, softly. He knew the feeling of homesickness well, getting bouts of his own from time to time. Sometimes it was for his original home, where he’f first started his journeying. Though at this point he’d walked so far, crossed so many rivers, he wouldn’t even know how to get back to his old family home.

“But we’ve been traveling for like, seven months already!” Owen pointed out, whining a little. “That’s such a long time!” And the collector supposed he had a point, that was quite a long time. And he had told Sausage he’d stop by at least once a year or so….

“Tell you what!” Scott said, clapping a hand on the other’s shoulder. “We’ll go to this place, and another one after it, and once we have enough goodies we’ll head home! That sound good?”

“Oh that sounds great!” Owen exclaimed, earlier enthusiasm returned. “I can’t wait to see the others again! Like umm, uhhh….” The brunette trailed off, and Scott laughed again.

“You don’t remember their names, do you?” He asked, forever amused by the llama’s comically short memory.

“I do! I do!” Owen argued back lightly. “I just need a little….reminder is all! My brian’s just tired from all this walking! Yeah that’s all it is!” He ended the sentence a little sheepishly, and Scott readily started listing off the names of his beloved llamas back at home. He missed the little guys too, he had to admit

“Well, there’s Crow and Mia at the Great Bridge, but i don’t know if you ever meet them-”

“I did!’ Owen interrupted, a giddy smile on his face.

“Then we’ll have to visit them too!” Scott continued, and the other man fell into a content silence as he listened to the collector go on a little ramble. “Then back at the garden there’s Perry, the little troublemaker! There’s Dan the pond fish. And there’s Violet, and Comet, and Astrid and Eloise..”

Owen cut him off again, talking about how much he missed Eloise. Apparently the two had been close friends, before the former had become Chromia’s resident bartender. Scott listened to the stories of all their little llama antics happily, sometimes chiming with anecdotes of how he’d had to stop them from doing things like breaking out of the garden.

He let Owen talk them both to sleep, deciding to call it a night a little earlier than normal. The ruin they were exploring was pretty deep underground, some old elven thing if he remembered correctly. He wanted an early start on mining the next morning, knowing it would probably take a good day or so to reach the thing. Though now that he had Owen to help, doing things was much faster than they used to be.

Hell, considering what the ruin contained, they might even head home early! He knew Pix was researching some old elf stuff, so maybe this was connected to that. Scott did prefer to keep the treasures he found, but he knew the archaeologist would appreciate much more than he would. Pix would get more out of it too, because he could study it and what not, while Scott was just gonna let it collect dust on a shelf.

He fell asleep that night quickly, Owen splayed out close by like he always was. Scott fell asleep, thoughts of tomorrow causing excitement to course through his limbs. He fell asleep wondering of elves and his llamas back home.

"And the game was over and the player woke up from the dream. And the player began a new dream. And the player dreamed again, dreamed better. And the player was the universe. And the player was love."

Oli rowed quickly, giggling all the while. He’d just faked his own funeral, and he’d be surprised if anyone took it seriously. It wasn’t meant to be taken that seriously though. It was just the easiest way he could think of to leave.

He was back near the festival grounds before he knew it, and honestly it felt strange. It felt strange sneaking around this world, walking around without his trademark bard’s hat and lute. It was like he wasn’t supposed to be there, because he wasn’t. The universe hadn’t wanted him here, he’d made his own way in. And now he was doing what the universe had probably wanted since the start all those months ago. He was leaving.

He was going to miss it, just a little bit. He was going to miss his empire, which had some of the finest builds he’d ever gone and made. He was going to miss walking around, touring all these beautiful places and playing music; really leaning into the slutty bard persona and just going wild with it really. He was going to miss the newly hatched dragon egg, he was going to miss his friends.

But these weren't his friends. Not really. These people, for all he loved them, were just different versions of his actual friends. And maybe all of them were just different versions of the same people, living new lives. Countless lives that stretched so far back no one could remember the first, but that wasn’t for Oli to know. All the bard knew was that these weren’t his friends, and that this wasn’t his home.

His friends had been in Afterlife, and then they all died. That world wasn’t home anymore, and this one wasn;t supposed to be either. Ya know that saying, home is where the heart is or something like that? Yeah, well Oli’s heart wasn’t in Afterlife anymore, and it certainly wasn’t here in Empires. Honestly, it was getting a little painful to look at these people and pretend he hadn’t known a different version of them.

Well, He thought, eyes landing on the great bridge as he passed by the area. Almost all of them . He thought Pix was watching, maybe felt the other’s gaze on his back. He probably wasn’t, but that man was scarily omniscient at times. Maybe he knew Oli wasn’t really dead, and how he planned on leaving.

The bard scurried his way across the abandoned festival sight, ignoring the pang of sadness he felt when glancing at it. His beloved stands and tents had fallen into disarray, after so many hours lovingly and painstakingly being set up. That shouldn’t matter anymore though, he was leaving. If Oli had wanted to fix it he should’ve done so before today.

He found his way to the Rift. The strange thing was now shattered, like glass, and no longer glowing purple. Expect for one spot, one spot in the side he was inexplicably drawn to. This…the back door of sorts shouldn’t exist, the Rift was supposed to be gone . Gone and never to be opened again. But Oli wasn’t going to question or deny such an easy escape. Maybe one of the Grumbots was holding out still.

He was gonna try and go to Hermitcraft, key word being try . Afterlife wasn’t a viable option anymore, for the bard's old home was empty and full of long abandoned builds. He’d always been an outcast here, in Empires. He was the weird guy who never quite fit in, the one who talked nonsense and never quite fit in, never quite found his place. He wasn’t supposed to be here, Oli wasn’t sure that he was supposed to be anywhere, but Hermitcraft was worth a shot he supposed. Besides, Gem was there, his friend , his neighbor who’d bloody left him for a second time . She was there, in Hermitcraft, maybe they could be friends again.

He knows he’s not the usual sort of person who they invite to that world, but there he isn’t an outcast. Because it’s a server full of so many different people, ones who never quite fit anywhere else and some who do fit elsewhere, they just prefer that weird little group. And Oli can see why. Maybe he won’t be outcasted there, maybe he’ll fit in. They at least won’t kick him out, he’s sure of that. And if they try he hopes Joe Hills and Gem will back him up. Man he misses Joe Hills. He can even see Tiny Tom again, tell the little guy hello from Jimmy and Joel; who have absolutely forgotten about the kid at this point.

Oli steps through the swirling, yet all familiar purple mass of the rift. He thinks he feels it close behind him, and is content to be taken wherever. Unless it’s the void with that stupid , fucking unreasonably long poem being muttered into nothingness again. Anything but there he’s fine with, because you can’t start over again in the void.

“You.”

"You are the player."

"Wake up."

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bakafox · 2 years

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Seen that there’s even people calling Tumblr checkmarks NFT’s or ‘like’ NFTs and.... NFT’s were scammy jokes that unfortunate people took seriously as an investment and that relied on a system that’s also physically horrible for the environment.

Tumblr checkmarks are a joke at Twitter’s expense that no one thinks have any real value at all, and buying them helps fund Tumblr and give them revenue in a way that is far more ethical than if they started data mining. Which they do not do yet. You get tailored ads because of the third party people they sell space to- there’s some posts floating about that explain it and I’m not going to try here, but that’s the simplest breakdown.

Like- Tumblr corporate is NOT a friend, yes it wants to make money off you, but you don’t have to also try and see everything done in some kind of worst possible light lest ye be Problematic yourself and be damned for all time for not Social Justice-ing right. This whole thing is just them transparently making a buck in a way that harms nothing more than possibly a bunch of egos.

And people buying checkmarks are paying a bit of money for a fleeting bit of entertainment that will be nothing but a memory and a chuckle later, like going to see a movie one time might do, (but cheaper depending on what theaters are near you,) and by doing so are helping pay the wages of the poor fifteen people and hamster or tumbeast that keep this hellsite operational for even people who never pay for a thing to be able to shitpost on.

(Sadly also paying executives and shareholders and so on- or will be if the site ever becomes profitable but like. You can acknowledge a site or service you use is a for profit service and give useful feedback so hopefully it will make its money in ways you approve of, such as using those methods to give them the money, and that doesn’t automatically mean you’re licking some boots clean.)

“Tumblr is not your friend” and “Tumblr is doing something funny/harmless to help make the money they need to make to survive and it’s okay to laugh and approve of the harmless thing” are two things that are not mutually exclusive.

And “Someone spent $8-$96US on an internet joke right now” and “That same someone also may give to charities or volunteer time or may be sacrificing some other form of entertainment or fast food they’d be getting otherwise and are probably not millionaires much less billionaires” are also very much not exclusive things.

Something something We can’t trust you to eat the rich if you can’t even identify who the rich are.

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gvftea · 4 months

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“One thing that does make me incredibly sad about Greta Van Fleet and the way they handle things, is the fact that they're finally playing at all these big, super well-known, and almost legendary venues only the biggest of bands get to play at and they don't think of getting it professionally recorded for those of us who haven't seen them, and will probably never seen them, playing live. They played at the Troubador and didn't record it, played at MSG and didn't record it, now they'll be playing at the Royal Albert Hall and they probably won't record it either. Have they ever considered that they have fans outside of the US and the UK? Fans who live in countries they'll probably never visit? And literally the only thing those of us who can't afford tickets, or can't see them live because they're not touring our countries have, are shaky clips people record on their phones, or Red Rocks or Audiotree, and both things came out like 7 years ago? It's just hella frustrating, because it's almost as if they only care about the fans who follow them around and attend several shows per year, which is a very small chunk of the fandom, btw. And I get it, they reasonably can't tour every single random ass country in the more secluded corners of South America or Europe, but like ??? Would it be too hard for them to hire a crew to film one show?”

Ok first of all, I would bet money they are gonna record RAH because the acoustics are next fucking level so idk why you are on here claiming they don’t plan to as fact. They recorded SH and sure the vinyls are limited and they should release it but they are all on YouTube and they could have those taken down in a HEARTBEAT if they wanted to. There is literally nothing special about the troubadour or MSG apart from their names. Troubadour quality would have been shit and MSG would be a fucking nightmare to record and it was the day after DC and there was no way it would have been logistically possible. Also, the MSG show was literally stale AF.

Secondly, I can see your side on how your are viewing it but I personally view it completely backwards from how you do. They do not owe us recordings of their live performances. They are not excluding us. I’m super sorry if you haven’t been able to see them but saying a band that has given us 4 albums in the span of 5/6years, and toured excessively through those years also owes us recordings of their performances is insane to me.

Thirdly, y’all need to stop acting like Greta holds endless power and autonomy. They are on a label, labels make all of a bands decision while they are under contract and music contracts are super fucked. Greta can’t just decide to record their shows, the label would have to, and they’d have to front massive amounts of money to even get a viable product that they don’t know would even sell. Labels are incentivized by money, making something freely accessible decreases the value of it. I know it’s fucked but it’s how the world works. And tour stops are determined by an algothrim built on a massive amount of data that analyzes cost of production against profit/revenue and demand. The label isn’t gonna front money to send them to places where the cost to profit ratio is small. And maybe they are looking to become independent artists after this, on their own label for this exact reason but you are only hurting your own feelings thinking the boys are fully in control of these types of decisions.

#greta van fleet #gvf #josh gvf #sam gvf #jake gvf #josh kiszka #danny wagner #danny gvf #jake kiszka #sam kiskza

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sebitorres · 9 months

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Welcome to Aurora Bay, SEBASTIAN SEBI TORRES! I couldn’t help but notice you look an awful lot like DAVID CASTAÑEDA. You must be the THIRTY FIVE year old BOUNCER AT OASIS & MONEY LAUNDERER. Word is you’re CHARISMATIC but can also be a bit COCKY and your favorite song is HYPNOTIZE BY THE NOTORIOUS B.I.G. I also heard you’ll be staying in OCEAN CREST APARTMENTS.

GENERAL DETAILS.

BIRTH NAME: sebastian "sebi" torrres AGE: thirty five DATE OF BIRTH: 28th of july 1988 PLACE OF BIRTH: east los angeles, california, usa ETHNICITY: mexican GENDER: cis male PRONOUNS: he/him ORIENTATION: panromantic / pansexual RELIGION: grew up catholic OCCUPATION: bouncer at oasis & money launderer

PERSONALITY.

POSITIVE TRAITS: charismatic & enigmatic NEGATIVE TRAITS: cocky & reckless MYERS BRIGGS: ESFP

THE RUNDOWN.

Sebi grew up in a loving family of 5 kids, and was his mothers favourite, though she’d never admit it if asked. But Sebi knew, he got away with a lot more than what his siblings ever could. But thats not to say he didn’t have a good relationship with his brothers and sister either, they also enabled their little brothers double standard as he was always good to them. He loved them, and they loved him, and were the only people he'd allow to call him Sebastian. At school Sebi was known as the class clown, despite being a smart kid he didn’t really care that much about formal education. This was probably the only actor of Sebi’s life his mother disapproved of, but the boy had big plans to use his charisma, charm, and wit to build himself an empire. In whatever capacity that meant. Some would say Sebi was cocky, and in a way that’s true.

The boy knew that out in the big wide world people were cruel, and looked down upon the smaller fish in society. If no one else outside of Sebi family would have faith in him, then he would build up his own self worth. No one else was going to save Sebi out of the comfort of his family home, but himself. This new mindset would be pinnacle in the events that led him from humble suburbs of los angeles lined by your regular middle class homes, to the bright lights of the big city itself. Sebi moved to work on whatever job he could get his hands on, he made sure not to be picky. He’d butter up rich housewives with compliments, and schmooze with their wealthy businessmen husbands so they kept him around, eventually asking him to do more higher paid jobs.

Now Sebi could of stopped here, he wasn’t rich but he was living a reasonably comfortable life at this stage. But it wouldn’t be enough, not while he saw bigger dollar signs that could be made. The more time he spent around these families, the more he was invited to work at their more private events, getting closer to his dream targets and closer until he was finally given an invitation as a friend. The work he was putting in was exhausting, often back breaking, Sebi’s family barely saw him at this time for almost half a year, but he promised them that he had a goal he was working towards — and he was going to reap the rewards. They seemed pleased, but a little confused. Things started to slow down for Manny after the first year of breaking the first layer of the rich families of LA, and he wondered whether they’d no longer have a use for him, which meant the end to his revenue stream. They’d outsource work, or close down their businesses, leaving Sebi to have to rethink his strategy.

After a few months of waiting, Sebi moved to Aurora Bay and got a job at Oasis as a bouncer, deciding he needed a safety net to fall back on. While working there, many of his old employers would greet him as they visited town. Some also moving for a seachange. Listening to the conversations of his drunk former employers, he heard something very very interesting. A family he had bonded with worked in finance, but had never exactly divulged on what exactly they did. Apparently they needed someone to ‘do the cleaning’ ever once in a while — very vague. Sebi took this opportunity to gently assert himself back into these peoples radars. That’s when they asked if he could help them with a part time, under the table, and very high stake task. They knew they could trust Sebi had no reason to sell them out. All he wanted was a healthy revenue stream for himself, and to send back to his family to make their lives easier. It took a moment for the penny to drop on what they meant. Money Laundering. Out of all the jobs Sebi had picked up in his life, they were all legal, all above board. It left him unsure on whether this was a line he was willing to risk.

While he had developed a good relationship with these people, he didn’t entirely trust them to help him if he got caught. At the end of the day, Sebi knew he was expendable to them. They asked him to think about it. A week later, Matthee texted the family with a simple response: ‘i’ll do it.” It shocked Sebi, after a bit of practice, how simple the process was. While working his job as a bouncer, he’d occasionally get a text to meet his secret employers. He’d acquire the dirty money from them, and integrate it into the financial system via a multitude of accounts. It was often very hard to keep up with the amount of accounts they had active in this scheme. Then, he’d layer with clean money to break connection to the source. Eventually, the money would then be used by his employers in the commercial system. Sebi couldn’t believe his eye’s when he saw his first payment for his efforts, and suddenly, the fear of getting caught was suddenly overshadowed by the fact this could be his ticket to reaching the goal he had as a young boy.

That’s if he kept playing his cards right.

THE RUNDOWN.

current connections.

Bora Winters: Employer & Bromance Delilah Carreño: Friend & occasionally babysits for Lalita Dandekar: Friend & flirtatious/annoyance Luciana Alvarez: Friend Mariana Velasco: Friends with benefits Cassius Banks: Roommate Samuel Kane: Coffee shop friends

wanted connections. ( wip )

///: ///

#updated introooooo (:#aurorabay.intro

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so-much-for-subtlety · 1 year

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Today I found out that our company offers an employee benefit where they will reimburse us for citibike (nyc bike ride share service).

Lyft acquired citibike (and several other bike share services in other major cities) and you have two annual membership options:

1. Citibike membership $205 per year

2. Lyft Pink All Access (LPAA) membership $199 per year

LPAA has same membership benefits of citibike, plus you get some lyft benefits, plus grubhub/seamless membership, plus membership to all the other major city Bike share services, plus other random benefits.

If you’re a citibike member already you can also transfer your membership to Lyft pink for free to get those benefits.

So why does LPAA cost $6 less than getting citibike membership alone?

There’s an argument that if you have a discount that you might be more likely to use a service they you wouldn’t have before. Maybe I don’t use grubhub now, but because now I get fees waived I’ll start using it (or use it more).

There’s probably truth in that, but it seems odd that they’ve only priced at $6 difference.

Someone mentioned in a Reddit thread a much more likely reason: it will greatly inflate the metrics for number of Lyft Plus members, which will look great on annual reports and make it look like they are more attractive investments.

It’s amazing to realize that these are not profitable companies: Lyft spends about $4 billion each year to make $3 billion of revenue. That’s like having a business model where I buy cans of soda for $1 each and sell them to people for $0.75 each. That’s great for the consumer but not sustainable!

The original assumption was that AI would allow for self driving cars in the ‘next 5 years’ but it seems to be looking like this is increasingly becoming less likely to happen anytime soon (at least not without killing a lot of passengers and pedestrians).

Lyft and Uber aren’t startups anymore, they are publicly traded companies but they still receive capital either by taking in debt or from PIPE (Private Investment in Public Equity) and basically they’re in bite-each-others-dicks-off type fight for a monopoly- as soon as one grids the other into dust there’s the possibility of making a profit- by janking up the prices! If you think Uber/Lyft fares are expensive now wait until you see what they’d be like when there’s no competitors!

Despite all this analysts are still saying that Uber/Lyft are great investments to buy right now (Uber technically *has* made profits in the past).

It’s so weird to be living in late-stage capitalism!

#disclaimer: I am not a financial professional #this is not financial advice lol #I don’t know anything!

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cbk1000 · 2 years

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So, work bullshit. I’ll try to summarize, but it’s still going to be long.

I talked a while ago about how, after immediately dismantling our team as soon as our boss left, within six months a consultant group we were working with essentially reassembled it because it’s an industry standard to have a revenue integrity team (problem solving and analytical work within the rev cycle, which is basically what we were doing under my old boss’ leadership). We were told we’d have job title changes and raises. The consulting firm got ousted because there was a lot of head butting between them and leadership, apparently, and it was determined that we weren’t really seeing the results we wanted from them, so it wasn’t in our best financial interests to keep the consultants on. But we were all told that leadership was still moving forward with the team, everyone wanted it, and it was just a matter of formalizing things with HR, which was going to take a while because everyone’s job titles had to be reviewed so they could align our roles, but in a way that was fair to people with decades of experience (most job titles have three levels; I am a revenue cycle representative III and would be going to an analyst role, but probably an analyst I position because I’ve only been here a few years, whereas some of the gals have been doing this kind of work for like 20 years, so they’d be higher level).

In the meantime, we work as this team while things are being finalized, we have a variety of projects and workstreams we’re juggling, and we’re reporting to the project manager who is heading the team. For months we do this. People are getting a little frustrated at the lack of updates other than ‘we’re still finagling with HR, but we’re moving forward’, but it’s understood that it’s only a matter of time. Just a little while ago, my supervisor asked me about any certifications or extra schooling I had, so that was obviously for HR/job title reasons.

Well, today we get a team update from the CFO, and it’s to blow some trite platitudes up our asses about what important work we’re doing and how appreciated that is--but after reviewing the team model, it’s been determined to be too large, so here’s the new reporting structure (I’ll be reporting to my original boss, so that’s something), and the team will actually be 3-5 people, plus a leader. We are welcome to apply if interested!!

So, basically, “You can apply for this job you’ve been doing for months that you were told repeatedly was already yours and would come with a raise, but since there are ten of you and only three to five openings, you definitely won’t all get in.” Also, we were told we’d be continuing our current work. MY CURRENT WORK IS REVENUE INTEGRITY. Is that going to change? Is that going to be handed off to the new team if I don’t apply/don’t get in, or are they going to do different work? My role since I was first hired has always been in this vein, so what am I supposed to do now? What the fuck is this going to look like moving forward? As recently as this Tuesday my old boss (now head of the revenue department after coming back) asked me if I had enough time to handle some charge correction work that she and the coding supervisor thought was something the RI team could take on, so as of fucking Tuesday of this same fucking week, the revenue department head was tapping me to take on new projects for the revenue integrity team. So I assume she found out only shortly before this email what was decided. A few of us have a meeting later this afternoon to talk about it, so I hope there’s some more clarity given, and maybe my old boss has specific plans for us that will be great, but as of right now, I am very, very pissed. I know this wasn’t the intention, and a lot of this has come from there being so much upheaval in this department, but essentially you dicked us around for months, had us function in these roles as temps while telling us it would become a permanent role, and now we’re unceremoniously informed that it was great of us to keep everything together while they sorted things out, but now it’s time for us to piss off.

#personal #i'm so fucking done #does anyone want to give me a lot of money so that i never have to work for a living again?

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raven-at-the-writing-desk · 1 year

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Hello! I was wondering but... what do you think about gender-bend Octavinelle?

I mean… I don’t have much to comment on for general genderbend AUs other than the characters’ physical appearance would be different? I don’t think much else change about most characters, because gender doesn’t necessarily equate to personality. It really depends on the individual interpretations of the AU; that's what gives it charm and makes it fun.

I guess that since Octavinelle are more “animalistic” (ie half fish), they’d perhaps have more aggressive personalities (since I believe that at least female octopuses sometimes kill their mates and eat them)? I don’t know if the change would be that significant though, since Octavinelle is already pretty aggressive in their business tactics. I certainly have a difficult time imagining Azul as that aggressive (or some human equivalent of it), especially considering that (s)he and Jade try to keep up a veneer of professionalism.

For the most part, Jade would still be Jade but just perceived as a “refined lady” instead of a “refined gentleman” before she backstabs you. Floyd would still be Floyd and probably not give a rat’s ass about who sees her acting “unladylike”. I also see the twins’ preferences for how they wear their clothes carrying over; Jade is all proper and tidy, Floyd is messy, carefree, and experimental. Azul would try to capitalize on her cuteness to convince desperate simps to hand her their money (idk, selling octopus bath water or finally getting into streaming as a source of revenue like he said he wanted to explore in episode 6).

I like seeing the different designs people come up with for genderswaps, but I guess my preference for fem!Octavinelle would be with long hair?? Just because long hair gives the nice imagery of a mermaid’s hair pooling and fanning out in the water, it’s so mesmerizing to watch.

(Pspspspspspsp have some doodles of f!J word I made recently 🤡 The second drawing features genderbent Raven just because I felt like it--)

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badomensunleashed · 14 days

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But please don’t explain the fuck does being sorry in their own way mean? They’ve done literally nothing else to make up for it (which I agree they don’t need to do) apart from drop more merch to make up the lost revenue. Do you have some psychoparasocial connection to noah where you know what he’s thinking?

As in it was clear it was not an easy decision or one they were happy with but needed. Why wouldn’t someone be sorry like in the guilty sense. Like it goes unsaid no one was winning here. Why do they have to make it up? They’re basically on break as far as I’m concerned. What little tid bits you get like merch was probably pre planned and is ran by their management, they even shared it on their managment insta. It’s not exactly like they owe us a whole vlog, music teaser etc. they’re taking a break. We got one insta story post in months it’s not like they should be posting everyday. I’m sure they’d get shat on if they were doing more and being called desperate to make up for it on the flip side. No one can win.

And no parasocial relationships just my opinion. It’s not white knighting I’m just going off how I would respond and think in these situations. I can’t say I’d phrase it any better, it seems it was a last minute decision as last minute press release. Honestly Noah probably isn’t even sorry and he shouldn’t have to apologise for taking his mental health off. If it cost people money that was their decision and risk. Like I said it’s mostly festivals cancelled right? So people shouldn’t be missing out on much anyway even if it was mostly for BO. Chill your tits not everyone who disagrees with you is a white knight maybe they just think you’re over dramatic.

…

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douchebagbrainwaves · 18 days

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YOU GUYS I JUST THOUGHT OF THIS

More likely, you'll just find that for some mysterious reason good things happen to them too. Starting a startup is not like having an idea I didn't want to be novelists.1 Thanks to Sam Altman and Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of this. If you've never seen a word before, it is genuine.2 He would say that this has happened to. Another group was worried when they realized they had to do it? To change the interface both have to agree to change it easily, or at least a generation to turn people into East Germans luckily for England. Dilution Users have worried about that since the site was about bands. In server-based application now for less than you think you'll need, maybe 50% to 100% more, because software changes fast and government changes slow. And acquirers tell me privately that revenue is not what growth rate makes a company a startup.

There's no incentive that would make me eligible for prescription drugs if I approached everyday life the same way as saying that something is worth doing, especially if you have a competent startup lawyer handle the deal for you, as Google did for Kleiner and Sequoia. There is nothing more valuable than the advice of someone whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the cost. A stage. Once investors like you is that you actually become a better investment.3 It shouldn't be that surprising that colleges can't teach students how to write software. Reminder: What I'm looking for are programs that run on Web servers and use Web pages as the interface. This lets me get ip addresses and prices intact.4 But I don't think so. Maybe the best way to explain how it's recession-proof is to do things that would make me eligible for prescription drugs if I approached everyday life the same way I write software: I sit down and start implementing it. In retrospect, he was before he became a professor at MIT.5 Possibly not. But we could tell the founders were earnest, energetic, and independent-minded enough to start a startup, you'll probably fail.

Some investors might expect the founders to accept vesting for a sum this size, and others that aren't.6 But when you understand the problem. Going upstairs his bulk will be more of a placeholder than an actual label—like putting NMI on a form that asks what you're going to have a book about how to make them irrelevant.7 There seem to be a tradition of startups taking VC money, you should do is to treat it as an upper bound on the size of the venture business, which have evolved the way they write software. Would anyone seriously argue that Cobol is equivalent in power to founders is just don't die, but the most important predictor of success. We thought Airbnb was a bad idea was that it was valuable and dangerous, and what that will mean for you if you choose them. It will always be lots of Java programmers, so if you're measuring usage you need a window of about two years when spam was increasing rapidly but all the big email services had terrible filters. So, in practice, the way to make yourself work on hard problems.8 Number one will be the limit; the number of temptations around you.

Notes

Only founders of Hewlett Packard said it first, to pretend that the Internet was as much as Drew Houston needed Dropbox, or working in middle management at a discount of 30% means when it converts. No VC will admit they're influenced by buzz.

We didn't try to go sell the bad idea, period. This seems to them this way, without becoming a Texas oilman was not just something the telephone, the space of careers does. Correction: Earlier versions used a technicality to get them to be discovered. After reading a draft of this essay wrote: My feeling with the guy who came to work on stuff you love: a It did.

They'd be interchangeable if markets stood still. Cost, again. How many times that conversation was repeated. If Congress passes the founder of the word as in Boston, and tax rates.

You can get rich, purely mercenary founders will seem as if having good intentions were enough to be room for something new if the similarity extended to returns.

If they no longer needed, big companies weren't plagued by internal inefficiencies, they'd be called unfair. With a classic fixed sized round, or your job will consist of bad customs as well.

If there's an Indian grocery store near you doesn't mean you suck. It seems likely that in the chaos anyway.

Above. But when you depend on Aristotle more than linearly with its size.

They hate their bread and butter cases. It may have been sitting in their hearts that if you do if your goal is to be sharply differentiated, so you'd have to do that. That's probably true of nationality and religion as well. How can I count you in?

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #generation #things #Number

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catmantalks · 2 years

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Imagine you asked your finance team about how money enters and moves through your company, and they couldn’t tell you exactly where each dollar goes and is spent. You’d probably fire them all. So why aren’t a company’s users held to the same standard? Wealthfront VP of Growth Andy Johns receives a surprising number of blank stares and head scratches to this question.

Johns has spent his career helping startups grow. He’s been a product manager and internet marketer at Facebook, Twitter and Quora, where he worked on growing their number of active users. Johns has deployed more than $10 million in online advertising spend, built email systems that sent over 50 million emails monthly and executed over 400 product A/B tests for user acquisition and retention. Simply put, he’s the renaissance man of growth.

At First Round’s recent CEO Summit, Johns set out to help startups elevate their growth teams, via advice on hiring an exceptional head of growth and by helping founders sharpen their own growth chops. He mapped out what growth entails, outlined the three mandatory skills needed to be exceptional at it, and provided one-off lessons from his years in the field.

What a Growth Team Actually Does “Do I really need this growth thing?” Four years ago, that inquiry was the most frequent question Johns received as he advised various companies on their growth initiatives. “Granted, the concept of a team dedicated to growth was still pretty new. Most startups saw growth as a company-wide objective and a bit of everyone’s role and responsibility,” says Johns. “Here’s the conundrum. Startups will build a really robust finance organization, but not a team with the responsibility to measure, understand and improve the flow of users in and out of the product and business. That’s the role of growth within a company.”

Finance owns the flow of cash in and out of a company. Growth owns the flow of customers in and out of a product.

In short, Johns believes that startups who have an established finance group but a fledgling — or non-existent — growth team have put the cart before the horse. “A finance team by definition measures, understands and improves the flow of capital in and out of a business. That’s important because it contributes to all sorts of incredibly important business decisions, from new hires to equity schedules, and from salary adjustments to office upgrades,” he says. “Finance uses its knowledge to help the business operate. What’s interesting is every company — and certainly the finance team — eventually realizes that the single biggest lever that it has for maximizing revenue potential is the number of users.”

Over the last four years, Johns has noted a shift in the line of questioning around growth. Now the most common question he gets is less about the necessity of a growth team and more geared towards how to hire someone exceptional to lead the charge. “Founders wanting to accelerate their high organic growth should bring a leader to take full ownership of it. In order to find someone great, you need to be able to determine if they can go beyond the basics,” he says. “To start, can they articulate the role of growth, and how it fits into the business? Can they go beyond the superficial explanation of growth as just measuring and testing stuff? There’s a skillset that they should be able to demonstrate when digging into these questions.”

The Three Mandatory Skills of a Growth Leader Over the years, Johns has identified three key abilities that are pivotal to any member of a growth team and compulsory for its leader to master. Here are those skills and a basic line of inquiry to discover if a candidate possesses them:

Building growth models. Ask them how they’d build a model for your company’s main product to grow at scale. It can be basic, but should capture the core levers that explains how your company will grow (versus say, Facebook, Quora or Twitter).

Developing experimentation models. Dig into how they’ve built testing and experimentation programs in a company. How have they organized a product design and engineering team around a testing schedule? Ask them to identify which experiments are most important and justify why.

Building customer acquisition channels. Can they identify, test and scale new customer acquisition channels? How do they choose from and cultivate different parts of the funnel?

Depending on the seniority of your growth hire, you’ll need a candidate who has a combination of these tools at her disposal. “If you’re hiring a leader of growth at the executive level, you need to show excellence in at least two of the three categories. If you find a candidate that’s a master of all three, you’ve got someone special,” says Johns. “For non-executive growth hires, they should show expertise in one and strong promise in the others.”

To truly gauge their answers — and grow your company — it’s important to know some basic growth frameworks. Here’s Johns’ deep dive into these three growth skillsets:

Know your Basic Growth Equation There are countless and complex growth models out there, but Johns recommends internalizing one specific equation. Here it is:

Johns learned this basic growth equation from his former boss, Chamath Palihapitiya, who ran growth at Facebook and now leads Social Capital. “Chamath uses this equation at the highest level to assess whether a product or a business has the ability to grow at scale for an extended period of time, through organic growth almost entirely,” says Johns. “In thinking about the products that I work on everyday, I can say that I follow this equation religiously.”

Here’s Johns’ breakdown of the three components:

Top of the Funnel: In looking for a robust top of the funnel, what is being asked is: can the product capture traffic and convert it at an increasingly higher rate into some meaningful type of usage? This is a more tactical variable and the least important parameter in the equation, according to Johns.

Magic Moment: This is the user’s emotional response when interacting with the product. Ideally, it strikes early and often in the product experience. “We have these moments with Wealthfront. One day, I went to bed and woke up to see it had harvested $3,000 in losses for me while I slept. It didn’t ask me to do anything or charge me; it just did it. That’s when I realized two things: One, how cool that I’ll have more money left over at year’s end and, two, I have to work on this product! That’s how investing should be.”

Core Product Value: This component involves the size of your market, the legitimacy of the problem you solve and how right you were with your product/market fit hypothesis. For products that get the “magic moment” and “core product value” right, the top of the funnel naturally and rapidly fills. And when you have tremendous top-of-the-funnel growth you don’t have to fight to fill it. You just need to remove friction where it exists.

You’ve got a magic moment when how you frame what you do evolves from "I work on this" to "I get to work on this."

This equation is a fundamental starting point for any conversation about growth — whether it’s to evaluate products or test the understanding and acumen of a potential hire. “So when you’re chatting with a head of growth candidate, ask her about her frameworks for evaluating growth in companies,” says Johns. “She should at least be able to start with that growth equation, and ideally dig deeper to show a degree of thoughtfulness that you haven’t even considered yet. Have her mock it up on a whiteboard and verbalize it. Both are necessary skills.”

When he asks a candidate to list the growth equation for Wealthfront, the exercise reveals their training and instincts. “I can tell what they’re pulling from experience, what they’re drawing from their research and how they integrate information they’ve picked up from our interview,” he says. “All of those sources amass to show how they capture the main dynamics around our growth engine. At times, I’ll use Amazon as an example of applying the equation in an exercise.”

Johns’ growth model for Amazon provides an example of how to apply the basic growth equation to a real company. Here’s how he explains it — and would expect a head of growth to describe it:

Vertical expansion. “When Amazon launched, it sold books. It’s growth was limited by books as a vertical. As it moved into more verticals, such as music or jewelry, it unlocked additional, latent growth potential and could expand at a faster clip. Every new vertical brings new growth acceleration. What’s key here is plotting which verticals to move into, in what order and with which plan to automate and scale.”

Product Inventory Per Vertical. “Product inventory within a vertical asks: how can Amazon go from selling 10 books to 10 million books to every book on the planet? Amazon’s growth is proportional to the depth of its product inventory per product vertical.”

Traffic Per Product Page. “Product inventory is directly linked to product pages that are capable of yielding additional traffic all over the web. The lever here is converting traffic at a higher rate to buyers.”

Conversion to Purchase and Average Purchase Value. “These components — the number of purchases and amount of each transaction by a customer — are strongly linked. Amazon optimizes this variable by injecting recommendation engines into the product. The company suggests a related product, which helps it convert another purchase and generate additional revenue.”

Repeat Purchase Behavior. “Then eventually the business gets so sophisticated that they can build mechanisms to drive repeat purchase behavior, such as introducing products like Amazon Prime. You just buy and buy.”

That’s just one example of a growth model for a real business. “So, when you’re interviewing growth executives and they say, ‘Hey, I love your business and product’ ask them to run through this exercise first,” says Johns. “If they can’t do it, they’re full of it or not very good at their job. In both cases, they’re not fit to command the engine of your company.”

Can They Develop Rigorous Experimentation Programs? At the end of the day, growth models and equations are theoretical; they need to be tested. So the next skill that a Head of Growth needs is the ability to develop rigorous experimentation programs. “This is more the classic definition of growth, which is to run a bunch of A/B tests. It goes a hell of a lot deeper,” says Johns. “I can’t emphasize enough how critical it is to evaluate the depth of their knowledge and skillset around experimentation. Some starter questions include: How do you identify what part of the funnel to focus on? How do you identify the most valuable test to run out of a set of experiments? When do you run — and not run — that test?”

Small Optimizations That Compound As you interview, push candidates to surface nuanced insights. Regarding experimentation, one of the behaviors that Johns has observed is that large companies really like small optimizations. “Bigger companies typically have a larger user base from which to test. Here’s a common approach that we took at Facebook: say there’s a part of the product that generates 100 million visitors per week. We could run an A/B test to 1% of that traffic and inside 24 hours have 100% confidence on the outcome of that experiment,” says Johns. “If it gave us a 5% change in user behavior, that’s wonderful. That would prompt us to do as many of those tests as fast as possible and let those bumps in growth compound.”

Back in 2008, that’s exactly what Facebook did. “That year, we finished the year with around 130 million monthly active users. Then, the board and executive team announced the goal for 2009: 300 million users,” says Johns. “It was daunting because it had taken many years just to get to 100 million. Now they wanted us to more than double in a year. At the time, we were growing roughly 1.5% week over week. If we grew at 2% week over week, we could hit the goal. That’s how we broke down the challenge and optimized experiments.”

If you’re not a social network with over a billion monthly active users, here’s a more relevant example if you are seeking to accelerate the growth of your user base:

Let’s say you’re a mid-sized company with 10 million users and you’re growing at 1% week over week. “So at the end of the first week you have 10.1 million users, and at year’s end, you serve 16.8 million users. Those are pretty good numbers — I’d probably write a check to that,” says Johns. “But let’s say the same company grows at 2% week over week. They start with 10 million monthly active users and end the year with 28 million. That’s even better.”

What most startups fail to consider is the third scenario. “The last column projects that you start at 1% week over week growth, but then let’s assume that the growth team is working on its active user rate,” says Johns. “So, every fourth week, the team improves that growth rate by 5% and it does that consistently over the next 52 weeks. Then you end up at 30.5 million users, which is more than the second scenario.”

That’s why big companies like small optimizations. “This is the philosophy behind Google engineers testing 40 different shades of blue in a particular sign up button,” he says. “When you’re a smaller company, that approach just doesn’t work because you don’t have 100 million users to throw in front of a ‘1% test.’ You have to do something different.”

“This is probably my favorite graph, which is not scientific but very symbolic. On one axis you have thoughtfulness. It measures how thoughtful you are with the experiments that you’re designing, selecting and implementing. On on the X axis you have the sample of users you can draw from,” says Johns. “It turns out then when you have tons of traffic, people tend to not be that thoughtful. Larger companies field many half-baked ideas, but startups have to be more deliberate, precise and careful with their experiments.”

Can They Test In Different Parts of the Funnel? Given that early to mid-stage companies have to be more thoughtful with their experimentation programs, they need to be disciplined with how they test within the funnel. “Startups only have so many opportunities to run an experiment in the product, and they’re also time bound by the cash they have in the bank,” says Johns. “With that said you need to run experiments that matter. Experiments that count when you are using smaller samples have to be incredibly thoughtful. Your future Head of Growth should understand that intuitively.”

To root this point in tactics, Johns juxtaposes two analyses on experiment scenarios — one that examines the impact of a large lift over a control and the second that looks at the impact of different base conversion rates. Let’s look at the first scenario:

This chart looks at 3 A/B tests. The base conversion rate just refers to the ultimate conversion rate of users executing an act you want them to do. In this case, the focus is on the column in green, which captures the percent change over the control. So, for example, in Example A, a growth experiment was run and performed 5% better than the control that you’re testing against. Example C is 30% better.

Now look at the impact on the required sample size that will be needed to prove that the experiment is statistically better. For Example A, you will need more than 72,000 samples in both the experiment bucket and in the control bucket to execute the test. And importantly, you’ll need 72 days to detect if the experimented change is 5% better than the control. “That’s a lifetime when you’re a startup!” says Johns. “If you have 24 months of runway and you just spent nearly 3 months of it on an A/B test, that won’t foot the bill.”

Conversely, if you take Example C, it takes 2 days to measure if your experiment is 30% better. “Everyone wants those results. If you’re a startup, be thoughtful but also be dramatic in the changes that you’re willing to make,” says Johns. “Seriously. Be dramatic. Don’t just move a button on a page. You may run that experiment, given that you have small traffic sizes, and because of the small lift, you may run that test for months or years. Produce dramatic lifts if you’re a young startup.”

Testing rounded corners or 40 hues of blue won’t get the job done if you have small traffic sizes. Muster the courage to run experiments that can produce dramatic lift.

And if the experiment fails? “If it’s dramatically worse, you’ll find out in two days as well and that’s okay. Cut your losses and move on,” says Johns. “If it’s dramatically better, you earn that reward right now and let it compound as fast as you can.”

Now let’s make the base conversion rate the variable and evaluate the impact on sample size and the duration of the experiment. As a reminder, the base conversion rate refers to the ultimate conversion rate. “Let’s say you have 100 people on your homepage and you’re going to run an A/B test on it, from top to bottom,” says Johns. “If 100 people started on the homepage and 3 of them converted, that’s a 3% conversion rate. Or if, somewhere midway through the funnel, there are only 10 people on the page, but 3 convert, that’s a 30% base conversion rate.”

Taken another way, the base conversion is a proxy for the depth of the funnel. “The higher the base conversion rate generally the better,” he says. “So, for the same reason, you’ll notice that a 10% lift on a high base conversion rate — such as 20% as in Example C — allows me to detect an outcome in two days. On the other hand, if I have a small base conversion rate — such as in Example A —- that lifts by 10%, it will take nearly three weeks to evaluate the result.”

The takeaway here is to go deep in funnels. “That advice is especially true if you have a product that requires a significant purchase decision. If I'm going to buy something worth $1,000 online and if you want to drive the conversion rate on people actually buying it, don’t run a test on the homepage,” says Johns. “Run a test as part of the purchase funnel, where they enter their credit card details. That’s where you want to be testing, because you can resolve those tests more quickly given that you’re dealing with a committed customer. That type of customer is more likely to respond to a different design or experience. That’s where you want to test.”

Make sure your future head of growth can articulate and manipulate these charts, all the while clearly explaining how she picks her spot in the funnel. “Usually candidates say, ‘I'm going to test everything because I can run through it all quickly.’ Let me translate that for you: ‘I'm just going to throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks,’” he says. “That’s not your executive leader. Maybe that’s a good entry level person. But what you really want in a growth leader is someone who understands the value and benefit of intelligent experiment selection and design.”

Don’t hire a head of growth unless you have healthy organic growth first.

A Grabbag of Guidance on Growth As you hire for your head of growth, Johns has a few stray suggestions:

You can’t sustainably grow something that sucks.“If you don’t have healthy organic growth, you have a product challenge. Hiring a growth leader isn’t the solution. Build your growth team after you demonstrate organic growth and a receptive market,” says Johns. “Frankly, you can’t sustainably grow something that sucks. Nothing replaces an incredible product.”

You don’t need or want a growth hacker to lead. “I say this from a recruiting perspective because it can be more of a bad sign. How many growth hackers do you know who have successfully executed on two to four years worth of growth work at Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn or Airbnb?” says Johns. “I don’t know any, but I know a lot of growth hackers that are clever and sophisticated in their own way. They understand tactics expertly and have worked on smaller products, but that’s it. You wouldn’t hire a finance hacker as your CFO, would you? Or a sales hacker as your Head of Sales at a SaaS company, right? Don’t fall sucker to that temptation.”

Your growth lead needs to be a product person. “A growth leader isn’t just a scientist experimenting,” says Johns. “With Wealthfront, the most meaningful changes that we make to the product are actually derivatives of deeper behavioral finance understandings. I like my chances with the candidate who comes in on Monday, having read a 30-page white paper based on two years’ worth of market research on how to get individuals to contribute to 401(k)s more often. That’s the person that finds the behavioral finance difference that we can integrate into the product that moves the needle.”

The most meaningful product changes will come from a deep intuition and empathy for the user of your product.

In order to establish an effective growth team and put an exception leader at its helm, a company must first demonstrate healthy organic growth. When it’s time to assemble a growth team, it’s critical that its leader can articulate the role of growth in the organization as well as have command over growth models, experimentation programs and various tests in the funnel. You’re looking for product-oriented, user-empathizing growth leader — not growth hacker.

“When it comes to growth at companies, there’s a spectrum of science and art. The artsy ones just build great products and don’t look at data or test. The scientific ones measure and test everything,” says Johns. “Your head of growth must be the fulcrum between those ends of the spectrum, balancing empathy and experimentation, passion and precision. It’s not an easy find, but when you do encounter one, do what you can to bring them on board.”

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